Was Born, Unless The Enterprising Boy Who Led Us To It Was
Mistaken; In That Case We Were, Ophelia-Like, The More Deceived.
VII
Such things do not really matter; the guide-book's object of interest is
seldom an object of human
Interest; you may miss it or ignore it without
real personal loss; but if we had failed of that mystic progress of the
silver car down the nave of San Pablo we should have been really if not
sensibly poorer. So we should if we had failed of the charming
experience which awaited us in our hotel at lunch-time. When we went out
in the morning we saw a table spread the length of the long dining-room,
and now when we returned we found every chair taken. At once we surmised
a wedding breakfast, not more from the gaiety than the gravity of the
guests; and the head waiter confirmed our impression: it was indeed a
_boda._ The party was just breaking up, and as we sat down at our table
the wedding guests rose from theirs. I do not know but in any country
the women on such an occasion would look more adequate to it than the
men; at any rate, there in Spain they looked altogether superior. It was
not only that they were handsomer and better dressed, but that they
expressed finer social and intellectual quality.
All the faces had the quiet which the Spanish face has in such degree
that the quiet seems national more than personal; but the women's faces
were oval, though rather heavily based, while the men's were squared,
with high cheek-bones, and they seemed more distinctly middle class. Men
and women had equally repose of manner, and when the women came to put
on their headgear near our corner, it was with a surface calm unbroken
by what must have been their inner excitement. They wore hats and
mantillas in about the same proportion; but the bride wore a black
mantilla and a black dress with sprigs of orange blossoms in her hair
and on her breast for the only note of white. Her lovely, gentle face
was white, of course, from the universal powder, and so were the faces
of the others, who talked in low tones around her, with scarcely more
animation than so many masks. The handsomest of them, whom we decided to
be her sister, arranged the bride's mantilla, and was then helped on
with hers by the others, with soft smiles and glances. Two little girls,
imaginably sorry the feast was over, suppressed their regret in the
tutelage of the maiden aunts and grandmothers who put up cakes in
napkins to carry home; and then the party vanished in unbroken decorum.
When they were gone we found that in studying the behavior of the bride
and her friends we had not only failed to identify the bridegroom, but
had altogether forgotten to try.
VIII
The terrible Torquemada dwelt for years in Valla-dolid and must there
have excogitated some of the methods of the Holy Office in dealing with
heresy. As I have noted, Ferdinand and Isabella were married there and
Philip II. was born there; but I think the reader will agree with me
that the highest honor of the city is that it was long the home of the
gallant gentleman who after five years of captivity in Algiers and the
loss of his hand in the Battle of Lepanto, wrote there, in his poverty
and neglect, the first part of a romance which remains and must always
remain one of the first if not the very first of the fictions of the
world. I mean that
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
Michael Cervantes; and I wish I could pay here that devoir to his memory
and fame which squalid circumstance forbade me to render under the roof
that once sheltered him. One can never say enough in his praise, and
even Valladolid seems to have thought so, for the city has put up a
tablet to him with his bust above it in the front of his incredible
house and done him the homage of a reverent inscription. It is a very
little house, as small as Ariosto's in Ferrara, which he said was so apt
for him, but it is not in a long, clean street like that; it is in a bad
neighborhood which has not yet outlived the evil repute it bore in the
days of Cervantes. It was then the scene of nightly brawls and in one of
these a gentleman was stabbed near the author's house. The alarm brought
Cervantes to the door and being the first to reach the dying man he was
promptly arrested, together with his wife, his two sisters, and his
niece, who were living with him and who were taken up as accessories
before the fact. The whole abomination is matter of judicial record, and
it appears from this that suspicion fell upon the gentle family (one
sister was a nun) because they were living in that infamous place. The
man whose renown has since filled the civilized world fuller even than
the name of his contemporary, Shakespeare (they died on the same day),
was then so unknown to the authorities of Valladolid that he had great
ado to establish the innocence of himself and his household. To be sure,
his _Don Quixote_ had not yet appeared, though he is said to have
finished the first part in that miserable abode in that vile region; but
he had written poems and plays, especially his most noble tragedy of
"Numancia," and he had held public employs and lived near enough to
courts to be at least in their cold shade. It is all very Spanish and
very strange, and perhaps the wonder should be that in this most
provincial of royal capitals, in a time devoted to the extirpation of
ideas, the fact that he was a poet and a scholar did not tell fatally
against him.
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